This place...this place was strange and yet, it was which was perhaps the strangest part of all. He was suppose to be dead. Regulus had gone to that cave set of never coming back out; avenging the great insult on his family, on his name. At no point had he even considered that there would be a place outside of those icy waters, that the faces of the dead would not be his final impression on the world.
The chance that this place had been an elaborate part of his mind protecting him from the creatures tearing him to bits, left when morning came and he awoke to find his mother in her prime. She was beautiful to him with those twenty-five emotional years cleared from her skin; the stress of their name crumbling at their feet erase from her eyes. She was young and radiant and all her youngest child wished to do was preserve her any way he could; protect her from all that he knew was coming and from what was still a mystery to him. He should have found another way; he should have ordered Kreacher to stay or used the imperius on a substitute. Anything that could have stopped the aging continue.
They didn't speak much, at least not about anything important, but everything she said he memorised. She was a different woman in her youth, more composed and Regulus found himself appreciating her even more than he ever had. He was going to stay with her until either his uncle came to his senses or she asked him to go wherever it was he was meant to be, even if it meant small talk and simple sandwiches.
Walburga Black could make sandwiches.
Regulus was resting on the couch with a book when he heard the door open and close, a small but deep thud following it. "Mother?" he called cautiously, as he marked his page and set it down, gathering himself as he stood. It wasn't his mother he saw however, no it was another relative looking far younger than he remembered; a relative he hadn't been permitted to speak with for over two years. He stood there silently a moment as he collected his thoughts, reminding himself of how different a world this was where people favoured the Weaselys and the Blacks got along. Technically this was just as much Alphards cottage as it was Walburgas.
"My apologies Uncle, I was not expecting you. Are you quite alright?." It was strange to address him again, almost as strange as it must have been for the older man to see a nephew he had yet to meet in his own time line. There would be no question what family the boy came from, he looked as Black as they came, but it still must have been odd. When had his uncle been so...short?